The rapid proliferation of low-cost wireless technology such as “Bluetooth Smart”, and emerging market opportunities viewing everyday objects as “gateways to a service” is driving an explosion in the number of entities wirelessly advertising their presence that surround us.
In the near future we'll be immersed in these ambient data sources. In a public and mobile context, thousands of potentially valuable wireless data sources will be available as we go about our daily lives. Some with known services, but most from undiscovered sources. This world holds incredible potential but only if the few valued sources can be separated from all others without the overhead of interrogation, or the need to query a remote server.
Whether it's through sounds, scent, or optical patterns, individuals in our natural world depend on the ability to directly associate unique natural signatures to goal driven discovery. Nature, through millions of years of evolution, has determined this direct discovery is essential information technology for its ecosystems. Whether it's identifying a bird by its call, or recognizing a product by its logo, it's the way humans naturally interface with the world.
Unfortunately our internet technology didn't follow nature's example. Our global internet developed around remote clients and centralized servers. It depends on entities like Google for data discovery, and indirect linked data to decode any identifiers such as MAC addresses and UUID's. This indirection has worked well for decades, but as the Internet of Things (IoT), Moore's Law, IPv6 and mobile technology move us from 100's of enterprise provided services to millions of ambient ones we're reaching a crisis. Just like the natural world immerses us in the sights, sounds, and circumstances of living, our connected world will soon immerse us in ambient digital information. And just like in nature, our digital applications will need better ways to find, and filter, valuable information from the background noise of thousands of simultaneously available services.
This puts a premium on giving our digital world methods supporting direct-discovery using human natural language (semantic) association. This is especially true where internet connectivity is lacking, or in a mobile environment where low-powered services are only transiently available.
Personal, goal driven, software applications will need a means to discover objects and opportunities of interest to users. Video is rapidly emerging as one means to allow mobile computational intelligence to observe our physical world, but while video can be used to identify objects and some situations it's very limited when it comes to recognizing an object's state or real context. For example video allows a computational device to identify a dog, but it can't tell if the dog is a lost dog. Video can't see “behind the curtain”. For example it can't see all the product offerings inside a store when the user is walking by outside.
The technology disclosed herein embeds a semantic signature and IPv6 agent address within a “Bluetooth Smart” GAP advertisement. This facilitates direct semantic discovery by any of the millions of Bluetooth 4.0 capable mobile computational devices. Even a coarse semantic filtering that allows an application to identify and disregard a substantial percentage of received advertisements as irrelevant to user goals offers significant benefits such as power savings and reduced bandwidth usage.